An interesting conversation amongst 3 evangelicals in their attempt to define Mormonism. One guest posits that you are really dealing with 7 different types of belief systems within the LDS (Mormon) umbrella.
Pasted as a transcript because lots of their conversation is hard to tolerate with periods of "shouldn't they know they are going to hell?" comments. Listen to the video if you want, I have pasted the relevant transcript below.
Interviewer: One of the things you sent me, Aaron, was that there are these different strains—six or seven different strains, so to speak, for lack of a better word—who identify as Mormons today... what are some of these main differences?
Once somebody says, "I'm a Mormon, I believe in the Restoration, and I follow some of these teachings," what are some of the different strains that people can follow today under the broad umbrella of Latter-day Saints?
Aaron: Yeah, it's really important when you hear a Latter-day Saint say, "We believe" or "We don't believe," they're typically speaking from a stream, inadvertently—maybe sometimes overrepresenting their stream.
The main streams that I identify are:
[1] Pioneer Mormonism. This is where someone's got more of an interest in the distinctives of Brigham Young. You'll find some modern Latter-day Saints that have this sort of flavor, where they're more friendly to some of these pioneer ideas. But you're going to see this more with the fundamentalist movement or some of the polygamous groups.
We interact with them in Utah—the Allred group, the Peterson group. There's just a number of them. People think of this as abstract, but it's quite real here in Utah, where we interact with people who are a part of these groups.
And then there are some mainstream Latter-day Saints who kind of have one foot in and one foot out, and you can tell that they have some more affinity with this.
[2] The second stream would be correlated Mormonism. This is going to be people who have a higher regard for Latter-day Saint prophetic direction. They think of the manuals and the general conference talks as being more sticky and reliable and perpetual in their momentum. They're to be trusted.
There's a lot of influence here with, like I said, Bruce McConkie and Joseph Fielding Smith. These people are either very affirming of the King Follett discourse and something called the Sermon in the Grove. They're very affirming that God has a God, affirming of something called spirit birth. They'll use language like, "We're literal children of heavenly parents." They're very overt about Heavenly Mother if you ask them.
Some people might hedge on "As man is, God once was; as God is, man may be," but that rhetorical layer of hedging—
[laughter]
—typically behind it, though, is essentially an affirmation of it.
[3] The third stream is Mormon neo-orthodoxy, or you might call it accommodationism. This is a view that was really spearheaded mostly by BYU professors who realized that they could minimize Latter-day Saint doctrine proper to what their standard works or canon teaches, irrespective of what their leaders have taught publicly.
So they really tried to approach something called official doctrine, or sort of a sense of formal dogma. They really tried to strip away things that were not supported by the standard works. And so you even had some people suggestively questioning whether Heavenly Mother was a doctrine.
You had a lot of Latter-day Saint professors. Big names in this movement would be Stephen E. Robinson, who wrote Believing Christ. Arguably, it's a kind of undermining and rejection of Spencer Kimball's Miracle of Forgiveness.
And then we have Brad Wilcox today, who has a really famous talk called "His Grace Is Sufficient." They're really trying to undo and undermine this very rich LDS prophetic tradition of teaching that salvation is, in the most robust sense, a merit system—that we're earning, qualifying for, and being worthy of the celestial kingdom and of exaltation.
The neo-orthodoxy movement, or the accommodationism stream, really is trying to say it's not about merit. There's still a works-based system there structurally, but they're really trying to go heavy into evangelical grace rhetoric.
And if I could speak very informally here, it's almost like they have a crush on the evangelical view of grace. They yearn to have—they're thirsty for—something that's more gracious.
[4] Another stream would be revisionism, and this is Blake Ostler, Benjamin Spackman. These guys are really into higher criticism. They have a very low view of Latter-day Saint prophets. For them, the standard works are not as binding. Rather, we have modern LDS prophets to almost help us understand the subset or the parts of the standard works that are still trustworthy.
Some of these guys don't even think God knows the future. They've bought into open theism, contrary to the prophetic tradition of the Latter-day Saint prophets and apostles who've taught very clearly that God knows the future exhaustively.
Blake Ostler, for example, argues that the Book of Mormon has an ancient, authentic core, but Joseph Smith added his own sort of fictional layer on top of it. He expanded this ancient core.
You're going to get this from guys like Jacob Hansen, where they're really trying to reinvent Mormonism with a heavy influence from Blake Ostler.
I'll try to finish this off.
[5] Primitive Mormonism. And this is a real movement here in Utah. This is very different. This is often a polygamy-denier movement, an adjacent stream of Mormonism that argues that Joseph Smith never practiced polygamy.
They have a very low view of Brigham Young—even a conspiratorial view of Brigham Young's involvement in polygamy. A lot of them don't really want to talk about the Book of Abraham or the later D&C sections. They don't really have a high regard for modern Latter-day Saint prophets and apostles, but they love the Book of Mormon.
And so, because of that, there's more of that early Mormon, Protestant-adjacent, evangelical-ish—sometimes I call it "evangelish"—sort of version or stream of Mormonism.
Some of these are members of the mainstream Latter-day Saint sect or institution out of Salt Lake City. Some of them have left the Latter-day Saint institution and joined other groups.
There's two more.
[6] There's the progressive [Mormon stream], and these are very real. I've talked with these people all the time. Progressive Mormons long for the Latter-day Saint institution to adopt same-sex marriage in a more robust way into its theology, its liturgy, and its increasing accommodation and honor.
They really celebrate the idea that in the Latter-day Saint movement, you can be transgender and go to church and hold your membership.
As of 2019, the LDS Church no longer counts same-sex marriage to be an act of apostasy for purposes of church discipline. So this stream—there's another Osler. There's a—I think it's Richard Osler and Blair Osler, not Blake Osler—but two other Oslers that really are representative of progressive Latter-day Saints who are very much into feminism and liberal politics.
But they're very much accommodated and welcomed into the Latter-day Saint movement, which doesn't do a lot of boundary maintenance anymore unless you're agitating against the leadership.
[7] And then finally, this is a gigantic stream in Utah: cultural Mormonism.
These are people who are not really that interested in theological truth claims. They might be defensive of a Latter-day Saint religion upfront, but when you talk with them, they're kind of like, "I don't care."
[laughter]
"I love the moral structure. I love that it makes me feel good. It makes me a better person. It kind of doesn't matter in the end whether it's true. It's still worth believing because of the social and moral benefit it brings into my life."
Anyway, those seven streams are very, very different, but they're the kinds of people we actually talk to in Utah. And I think they're important because it helps us not project any one of those onto the whole movement.
